How to Make a Million Dollars Fast with a Website

This is one of my favorite stories. It’s so simple, so easy to make, that it seems it can’t be true… But it is! This is a story about how a million dollars idea could be created just in 20 minutes, the story of http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/. “Own a Piece of Internet History” is the slogan, under which the site appears in the search results of the popular search engines, and its place there is well-deserved.

How to make a million dollars fast? Here is how…

Once upon a time, there was a British student called Alex Tew, 21, who experienced a shortage of money for his university education. In 2005 he was about to start a business management course, and he was really worried about the money needed to finance his education. He didn’t want to find himself in a situation in which he would be paying off a student loan for years after graduation. A money making plan was needed to prevent this from happening. Alex was determined to avoid getting seriously indebted for years and took a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Then he started a brainstorming session. After several minutes, just one question appeared on the sheet: How can I become a millionaire? Several minutes later there was an answer – sell one million pixels from a web page, for one dollar each, to people who want to advertise. Simple and just beautiful idea. Initially it seemed to be impossible to make a million with such a crazy idea, but there was nothing to be lost.

The Business Idea Is Working…

A site worth a million dollars

The student knew something about web design and spent his pocket money for a domain name and a hosting account. In a couple of days the site was up and running. The smallest advertising space that could be purchased was 10 x 10 pixels square for a 100 bucks each. The first ads were bought by some family members and friends and Tew already had 1000 dollars of sales. More popularity was needed. Instead of drinking himself into oblivion, celebrating the first profits, Alex spent all he earned for some media publications in the local newspapers. This was really a smart move – reinvesting the revenue back in the business. The media found his idea really interesting, and soon it appeared on many other newspapers for free. The business started to expand really quickly and just in a couple of weeks, Tew had 40 000 green dollars in revenue. This was completely enough for him to start even two business management courses. But the moneymaking machine had just started. Magazines, newspapers, bloggers and many other subjects found the idea just fascinating and media interest skyrocketed.

The Million Dollars Target Reached

Several months after the start of the venture, the pixel reserves were almost sold out and the revenue reached 1 000 000 dollars. At the end of the pixel sales there were only 1 000 pixels left and thousands of people wanting to buy them. The pixels were sold for nearly 40 thousand dollars on an eBay auction.

It was not as easy as it seemed…

But nothing was as easy as it seemed. Tew experienced many problems during his ‘business journey’. He and his million dollars site were both not prepared for the big explosion of sales and traffic. Every link and banner had to be manually inserted in the page and when the purchase orders reached several hundreds Alex had to hire some people to help him with placing his clients’ banners. Also, his hosting account at some point of time was not able to serve all visitors of the site, that reached 4 000 000 for the last couple of months. This was not enough, but his payment account was blocked because of the flood of so much money in so short time. But Tew managed to quickly resolve all of these and some other issues. His solution finding skills were one of the main factors for his great business success in such a short period of time.